About the Site

The Editing Brain Dump is an editing and workflow-oriented site almost as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s. During the course of a film, I invariably try new workflows, come up with solutions or workarounds to technical problems, or learn a nifty trick that warrants a bit of publicity. Therefore, these articles are designed to help me document and remember these new things I do as an editor or assistant editor, since it’s very easy to let valuable information slip away during the chaos we normally work in. If anything in here is helpful to anyone else, that would make me very happy. Any files I attach to my articles may be used free of charge, without attribution, and modified at will. If you do find something useful, or if what I write here solves a problem for you, do drop me a note to say hello. It’s always nice to know that you’ve helped someone out.

About Me

Evan and Hellboy 2 Butcher Guard

Originally from Syracuse, NY, I started my career in the film industry at the age of 16, between my junior and senior years of high school, with an internship at Stan Winston Studio. After graduating from high school and being accepted into USC’s film production program, SWS hired me back to do tech support as their Systems Administrator. I worked there part-time for all four years of college and full-time for one year after, in the process helping to set up their visual effects department, SW Digital, as well as giving a hand anywhere I could. It’s a place where you can wear as many hats as you want to fit on your head, and one of my favorite “not in my job description” tasks I volunteered for was to help solder multi-color LEDs into and then assemble a robot head for A.I.  Stan Winston Studio was a fantastic place to work, full of amazing people with whom I am very proud to be associated.

During college, though, I got bit by the editing bug. I found that, even more than creature or visual effects, I loved sitting in the editing bay for hours on end putting my student films together. So a year after college, and five years after starting my job at Stan Winston’s, I left to pursue editing full-time. It was slow at first, but through some family connections, friends I made at SWS, and a bit of luck, I got my first few jobs as an assistant editor, and things have taken off from there.

Some selected credits as an editor or assistant editor include:

• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – Associate Editor
• Broken Kingdom – Editor
• Towards Darkness – Editor
• Hellboy 2 – 1st Assistant Editor
• Rambo – 1st Assistant Editor
• Pan’s Labyrinth – 1st Assistant Editor (U.S.)
• Rocky Balboa – 2nd Assistant Editor

And as of January 2012 I’m just about to start work editing a film called The Time Being.

As I continue to pursue editing more than assistant editing, I nonetheless remain a techie, and the creation of this site provides me a way to record all the useful and useless technical things I’ve had to learn to do my job. It’s a dry read for most, I’m sure, but hopefully at some point it will save someone a bit of time.

Thanks for reading.

–Evan Schiff

January 19, 2012

Me in front of a Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol poster in Barcelona

Bernat Vilaplana, Guillermo del Toro, Gyula Mózes, and me